He thanked me for my ingenuity, but assured me that the problem was the other way about — that the person who was capable of making decisions for Adam Zimmermanwas already under threat, losing the authority of properly informed consent with every hour and every day that passed.
“You are what you are, Morty,” he told me, “And it is a wonderful thing to be. But it is not what I am. I would be delighted to think that it is something my son might become — and I trust that the world will choose to exercise my right of replacement eventually — but your own parents understood that the necessity of making room for future generations is a component of progress. I am delighted, too, that the horror which my kind had for their own mortality allowed them to make a world for their descendants which was liberated from that curse, as far as is humanly possible. But Adam Zimmerman is a mortal man, and was born to die. I would rather that Adam Zimmerman faced up to his commanding fears, in the end, than obliterate himself in their evasion. The only life story possible to a man of my kind is one that begins with birth and ends with death, no matter how the plot might be thickened and tormented in between. I am glad to have played a part in the triumph that has altered the world out of that recognition, but mystory would be false if it ended otherwise. Let me go, Morty, I beg of you.”
Everything that Adam had cynically said about fame in the distant, forgotten past proved to be all too obviously true in the munificent present that consumed him. The basis of his celebrity was his mortality; what fascinated the citizens of the newest New Era, above all else, was Adam Zimmerman’s awful misfortune in being a man who one day must die…for them, as for him, there was only one end to his story that seemed appropriate.
So they did, indeed, let him go.
Like all the philosophers, lovers, artists, hobbyists, mystics, and martyrs of the Human Era, Adam Zimmerman reconciled himself in the end to the notion that angst was unconquerable. It could be repressed, ignored, sublimated, stared full in the face or frozen down for thousands of years, but it couldn’t be beaten.
Adam certainly did not enjoy this discovery, but he was proud of himself for having made it. It seemed to him to reinstate and reinforce — as nothing else could have done — his old self-sufficiency and his old self-discipline. Alongside the realization that he did not really want any of the kinds of emortality that his hosts could procure for him came the realization that he was free at last to succumb to the flatteries and seductions of fame. He could give the innocents of the new Golden Age something that no one else could or would: a precious taste of human dereliction and death. He could make them appreciate the privileges they enjoyed a little more piquantly, by showing them what it was to be without such privileges.
Adam decided that he would no longer retreat from angst, but would revel in it instead, in order to show a world that was without angst the true meaning of mortal existence: the true significance of his own state of being.
“I am not just a man,” Adam told his relentlessly inquisitive audience. “I am a symbol. You must learn to understand me, for I am not merely famous, I am fame itself.”
They loved it.
They drooled over every aphorism he let fall, no matter how obvious or overwrought it might be.
Adam set out to make the twilight of his life into the ultimate dramatic performance. He was determined to show the undying what it meant to die with dignity. It was not enough to display the physical processes of decay which would claim him; it was necessary to show off the psychological warfare that had run parallel to physical decay in his own time.
It was a wonderful show.
That which had been trivial and commonplace in his own world, where millions of lives had been terminated by disease, violence, misfortune, or a few carelessly juggled figures on a balance sheet, was now not merely unique but tremendous.
In the years that followed his revival and the end of the AMI war, Adam’s hair turned gradually grey. He let it grow long, and grew his beard as well. He asked his hosts to make him a guitar, and he began to play again, singing songs in German and English that he remembered from childhood and adolescence, and learning new ones that his faithful admirers found in ancient data banks. He even composed some songs of his own: sad songs about sex and death, war and poverty, pain and love.
He abandoned privacy, and gave himself entirely to his public. When he was not singing, he talked, frankly and with occasionally painful honesty, allowing all his thoughts to be recorded for infinite posterity as well as being eagerly lapped up by the everpresent listeners. He began to style himself Adam X, to signify the fact that he was the great unknown.
He planned his death meticulously, although the possibility of suicide was firmly ruled out. He must die, he decided, of what had passed in his own time for natural causes: of cancers that would burst spontaneously within his frail flesh; of the gradual erosion of his tissues by the forces of biochemical corrosion; of the failure of the coordinating systems that bound his disparate cells into a coherent whole.
He decided that he would use no anesthetics, suffering the pain which would come with these varied afflictions. This was not a decision taken out of courage — he assured his audience that he had always been a physical coward — but out of a sense of responsibility.
He knew that this was the only chance which the people of the thirty-third century would ever have to understand that kind of suffering, and he was determined not to cheat them. He felt that his pain, his tears, his shiverings, his sadnesses, his fears — allhis stigmata — belonged to his audience rather than to him, because it was these which gave significance to his presence in their midst.
I believe that in planning all this, carefully preparing for it all, and going through it — not without difficulty, by any means — Adam X became by slow degrees a happy and contented man, at peace with himself and his angst. I believe, too, that he became a prouder man than he had ever been in the days when he took his gluttonous part in the rape of the world. He became a more joyful man than he had ever been, even at the heights of ecstasy which his relationships with Sylvia Ruskin and his many mistresses had allowed him temporarily to reach.
By making death into fulfillment, Adam robbed it of almost all the power it had once exercised over his imagination. He moved his angst from the side of moral debit to the side of moral credit in the account book of his psyche, and with that cunning move — so like in spirit to the legerdemain that had been his genius in days gone by — he turned a potential loss into a handsome profit.
Buoyed up by his pride and joy, he lasted far longer than anyone could have reasonably expected, comfortably exceeding a hundred years of subjectively experienced life even without the aid of IT.
I was there when he died, alongside his fellow time travelers. We wept for him, and for his world, but there was gratitude as well as grief in our tears.
Adam died on the day which would have been identified in his calendar as the twenty-fifth of July, 3299, at the age of one thousand three hundred and thirty-one. This was, of course, a record in a world from which death had been largely banished — but it was one that no one expected to last very long.
Adam died naked, as nature had made him — but he died in a comfortable bed, in sheets which felt to him like the most sensuous silk, and which reminded him pleasantly of riots of sexual excess enjoyed with his most voluptuous mistresses.
He had been working on his last words for many years, redrafting and polishing them endlessly, and he managed to deliver them all before losing his powers of speech.